The bookshelf

Good, clean fiction. At last.

Name: At Home in Mitford
Availability: InStock
Author: Jan Karon

Browse our handpicked clean fiction reads below, from contemporary, historical fiction, literary prize winners, translated favorites and a good number of classics.

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103 books to explore

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LiteraryTranslated

Collected Works

Lydia Sandgren

Martin Berg runs a struggling publishing house in Gothenburg, and it has been years since his wife Cecilia walked out of the family's life without a word. When their daughter Rakel stumbles on a clue to where her mother went, she and her brother follow it across Europe and back through their parents' past. A long, absorbing novel about love, art and absence, and winner of Sweden's August Prize.

ClassicsLiterary

Elizabeth and Her German Garden

Elizabeth von Arnim

Published anonymously in 1898, this is a year in the life of an English wife on her husband's estate in northern Germany, where she escapes household duty, unwanted visitors and the "Man of Wrath" into a garden she is determined to make her own. Wry, sunny and quietly rebellious, it reads like a letter from a very funny friend.

ClassicsLiterary

The Enchanted April

Elizabeth von Arnim

On a wet February afternoon in London, two women who barely know each other answer a newspaper advertisement for a small medieval castle on the Italian coast, to let for April. With two strangers recruited to share the cost, four unhappy women arrive at San Salvatore, and the month slowly works on each of them. Funny, generous and full of wisteria.

TranslatedContemporary

The Travelling Cat Chronicles

Hiro Arikawa

Satoru and his cat Nana set off across Japan in a silver van, visiting old friends one by one in search of someone who could give Nana a home. Told partly by Nana himself, with a former stray's dry opinion of everyone, it is a gentle road trip that slowly reveals why the journey matters so much.

ContemporaryLiterary

Darling

India Knight

Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love, moved to the present day. Marooned in a rambling Norfolk farmhouse with her gloriously eccentric family and no phone signal, teenage Linda Radlett longs for love and goes looking for it in London, with her cousin Fran watching every misstep. Sharp, funny and fond of everyone in it.

Classics

The Secret Garden

Frances Hodgson Burnett

Orphaned in India, sour and lonely Mary Lennox is sent to her uncle's vast house on the Yorkshire moors, where nobody wants her and a garden has been locked for ten years. With a robin, a moorland boy called Dickon and a hidden cousin who believes he is dying, she brings it back to life, and herself with it.

Classics

Anne of Green Gables

L. M. Montgomery

Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert send for an orphan boy to help on their Prince Edward Island farm and get Anne Shirley instead: eleven, red-haired, talkative and in love with every word she knows. Her scrapes, friendships and boundless imagination win over Avonlea one person at a time.

ContemporaryRomance

The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic

Sophie Kinsella

Becky Bloomwood writes about saving money for a London financial magazine, and spends her own faster than she can earn it. As the letters from her bank pile up unopened, she tries cutting back, then making more, and gets nowhere with either. The first Shopaholic book, a bright, giddy comedy that is kinder to its heroine than she is to her credit card.

ContemporaryRomance

The Overdue Life of Amy Byler

Kelly Harms

Amy is a small-town librarian in Pennsylvania who has raised her two children alone since her husband walked out three years ago. When he turns up wanting to make amends, she does something unheard of and takes the summer for herself in New York, where she remembers who she was before. A warm, funny novel about a mother's long-overdue break.

Literary

A Psalm for the Wild-Built

Becky Chambers

Centuries after the robots of Panga woke up and walked off into the wilderness, a restless tea monk named Dex leaves the city to serve tea in the villages, and then heads further out. On a mountain road, Dex meets Mosscap, the first robot anyone has seen in generations, who wants to know one thing: what do people need? A short, hopeful book about rest, purpose and kindness.

ContemporaryRomance

The Garden of Small Beginnings

Abbi Waxman

Three years after her husband died in a car accident, Lilian Girvan is holding it together in Los Angeles for her two young daughters, mostly. When her job as an illustrator sends her to a Saturday vegetable-gardening class, she finds herself among a mismatched group of beginners and a patient instructor named Edward. Funny, frank and full of heart.

HistoricalRomance

Circle of Friends

Maeve Binchy

Benny Hogan, the cherished only daughter of a shopkeeper in the small Irish town of Knockglen, and Eve Malone, an orphan raised by the nuns, have planned for years to go to university in Dublin together. In the late 1950s they finally do, and find a wider circle of friends, a first love for Benny, and a betrayal neither of them saw coming.

Historical

The Kitchen Front

Jennifer Ryan

Britain, 1942, and rationing has the nation's cooks improvising. When a BBC radio programme announces a cooking contest whose winner will become its first female co-presenter, four very different women enter: a war widow, her estranged sister, a kitchen maid and a London chef. A warm story of rivalry, friendship and making do.

Contemporary

Under the Whispering Door

TJ Klune

Wallace Price is a ruthless lawyer, and then he is dead. A reaper collects him from his own sparsely attended funeral and brings him to a strange little tea shop where a ferryman named Hugo helps souls make their way to whatever comes next. Wallace is given one week to live the life he never did. Tender, funny and surprisingly comforting.

LiteraryContemporary

Life of M

Rachel Cusk

M has been one of the most recognisable faces in the world since she was a child. When a writer meets her in a bookshop and offers to set down her life, the project spreads out across olive groves, hotel rooms and film sets, and turns into something larger than one woman's story: a steady look at how anyone finds what matters inside an ordinary life. From the author of the Outline trilogy.

ClassicsLiterary

84, Charing Cross Road

Helene Hanff

In 1949 Helene Hanff, a New York writer with more taste than money, posts a list of out-of-print books to a shop at 84, Charing Cross Road in London. What comes back is twenty years of letters between her and a reserved bookseller named Frank Doel, trading rare editions, food parcels through the rationing years, and a friendship neither of them ever quite names. All true, and barely a hundred pages.

ContemporaryLiterary

The Chalk Artist

Allegra Goodman

Collin James waits tables in Cambridge and gives what is left of himself to chalk drawings that the first rain takes away. Nina Lazare teaches high school and cannot hold her class, and her father built the virtual worlds her students would rather live inside. A love story set between a game studio and a classroom, about what art costs the person making it.

ContemporaryRomance

A Year to Change a Life

Kitty Arthur

Trudie works at a bookshop called The Nook and has kept her world small and safe since the loss that shrank it. Then handwritten letters from her aunt begin to arrive, one after another, each setting her a task: change the lives of five people inside a year. A warm small-town romance about being nudged back out into the world by someone who knew you well.

ContemporaryLiterary

The Correspondent

Virginia Evans

Sybil Van Antwerp, a retired lawyer in her seventies, has written letters all her life: to her brother, her friends, the authors she admires and the people who have wronged her. Told entirely through that correspondence, her story slowly reveals the grief she has never spoken of. A quiet, deeply moving novel about the written word and making peace late in life.

Mild violenceMild sexual references

Classics

The Fortnight in September

R.C. Sherriff

Every September the Stevens family of Dulwich takes the train to Bognor for two weeks at the same guesthouse by the sea. Nothing dramatic happens, and that is the point: Sherriff's 1931 novel finds quiet grandeur in an ordinary family's holiday. A gentle, much-loved classic.

LiteraryHistorical

Trust

Hernan Diaz

A celebrated novel about a Wall Street tycoon and his wife in 1920s New York turns out to be only the first of four accounts that contradict one another, each revealing more about money, power and who gets to tell the story. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Contemporary

Sipsworth

Simon Van Booy

After sixty years in Australia and the deaths of her husband and son, Helen Cartwright returns to the English village of her childhood wanting only to be left alone. Then a small mouse turns up in her kitchen, and her careful routine begins to change. A tender story about second chances arriving in the most unexpected way.

ContemporaryRomance

Goodnight June

Sarah Jio

New York banker June Andersen inherits her great-aunt Ruby's children's bookshop in Seattle and plans to sell it. Then she finds letters between Ruby and Margaret Wise Brown, the author of Goodnight Moon, hinting at the story behind the classic. A warm novel about books, family and starting over.

ContemporaryLiterary

Ella Minnow Pea

Mark Dunn

On the island of Nollop, the council begins banning letters of the alphabet as they fall from a monument to the man who wrote the pangram about the quick brown fox. Told in letters that must avoid every forbidden character, Ella's story grows ever more ingenious. A playful celebration of language and free speech.

Historical

The Bride's House

Sandra Dallas

In a Victorian house built for a bride in the Colorado mining town of Georgetown, three generations of women fall in love, make hard choices and keep secrets. Sandra Dallas follows them across half a century. A warm, absorbing family saga.

ContemporaryLiterary

Noah's Compass

Anne Tyler

Pushed into early retirement at sixty-one, Liam Pennywell moves to a smaller apartment and wakes in hospital after a break-in, with no memory of the night. His search for what he lost draws him back toward the family he has kept at arm's length. Anne Tyler at her gently funny, compassionate best.

HistoricalContemporary

The Girl Who Wrote in Silk

Kelli Estes

Exploring her late aunt's island estate near Seattle, Inara Erickson finds a sleeve of silk hidden in the house, embroidered with a story. It leads her to Mei Lein, a Chinese girl driven from her home in 1886. A moving dual-timeline novel about a buried chapter of American history.

Historical

The Story She Left Behind

Patti Callahan Henry

In 1927 the famous author Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham vanishes off the South Carolina coast, leaving her eight-year-old daughter Clara behind. Years later, Clara follows the clues her mother left in the pages of a legendary book. Inspired by a true literary mystery.

ClassicsHistorical

A Month in the Country

J.L. Carr

In the summer of 1920, Tom Birkin, a survivor of the trenches, arrives in a Yorkshire village to uncover a medieval wall painting in its church. Over a few golden weeks the work, and the people around him, begin to heal him. A short, luminous classic.

ContemporaryTranslated

The Full Moon Coffee Shop

Mai Mochizuki

Under a full moon, a coffee shop run by cats appears in Kyoto, only where and when it is needed. Its cakes and drinks are chosen from each visitor's stars, and it finds people at a crossroads in their lives. A gentle Japanese bestseller for readers of Before the Coffee Gets Cold.

ClassicsTranslated

The Alchemist

Paulo Coelho

Santiago, a young shepherd in Andalusia, dreams of treasure and sets out across the desert to find it in Egypt. What he learns on the way matters more than what he is looking for. A short fable that has sold well over a hundred million copies.

LiteraryHistorical

The Amateur Marriage

Anne Tyler

Pauline and Michael marry in a rush of wartime romance in 1940s Baltimore, and spend the next thirty years discovering how mismatched they are. Anne Tyler follows the marriage and its consequences across three generations. Wise, funny and quietly heartbreaking.

Historical

The Women of Oak Ridge

Michelle Shocklee

In 1944, Maebelle Willett arrives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to work at a secret government site where nobody will say what they are making. An unlikely friendship with another woman at the plant draws them both toward truths that will change their lives. Faith-filled historical fiction about the Manhattan Project.

HistoricalRomance

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

In 1946, London writer Juliet Ashton receives a letter from a stranger on Guernsey who has found her name in a secondhand book. Their correspondence draws her into the lives of a book club formed during the German occupation. A funny, heartfelt novel in letters.

Historical

Longbourn

Jo Baker

Pride and Prejudice from below stairs: Sarah, a housemaid at Longbourn, washes the Bennets' linen, blacks their boots and dreams of a life beyond the kitchen. When a mysterious new footman arrives, her world begins to shift. A rich, clever companion to Austen.

Literary

Home

Marilynne Robinson

Glory Boughton comes home to Gilead, Iowa, to care for her dying father, the old preacher, and is soon joined by her brother Jack, the family's prodigal son, back after twenty years away. A deeply felt novel of family, faith and forgiveness, set alongside Gilead.

LiteraryContemporary

Still Time

Jean Hegland

John Wilson, a Shakespeare scholar, is losing his memory, and the plays he loved now come to him in fragments. As he tries to hold on to himself, he longs to make peace with the daughter he has hurt. A tender novel about love, forgiveness and the stories that stay with us.

Contemporary

Eat Cake

Jeanne Ray

Ruth copes with life by baking cakes, and life is about to need a lot of them: her husband loses his job, her difficult father moves in after an accident, and her mother is already there. So Ruth turns to the one thing she knows best. A warm, funny novel about family and second acts.

ContemporaryTranslated

What You Are Looking For Is in the Library

Michiko Aoyama

Five people at turning points in their lives visit a small community library in Tokyo, where the librarian, Sayuri Komachi, seems to know exactly what each of them needs to read. Her unexpected recommendations change everything. A gentle, uplifting Japanese bestseller.

Historical

Remarkable Creatures

Tracy Chevalier

On the fossil beaches of Lyme Regis in the early 1800s, poor, self-taught Mary Anning finds extraordinary bones and an unlikely friend in Elizabeth Philpot, a middle-class spinster. Together they face a scientific world with no room for women. Based on a true story.

Contemporary

The School of Essential Ingredients

Erica Bauermeister

Once a month, eight students gather in Lillian's restaurant kitchen for a cooking class. As they learn her recipes, each carries a story they have not yet told. A warm, sensory novel about food and the ways it heals.

Contemporary

The Atlas of Untold Stories

Sara Brunsvold

Chloe needs to tell her practical mother, Edie, that she has taken a job teaching art in Prague, and her sister Lauren has troubles of her own. The three set out on a nine-day road trip to literary landmarks across the American heartland. A warm novel about mothers, daughters and books.

ContemporaryRomance

A Big Storm Knocked It Over

Laurie Colwin

Newly married Jane Louise Parker, a book designer in New York, is happy and anxious in equal measure. Colwin's final novel follows her through marriage, friendship and the prospect of a family of her own. Funny, warm and full of good food.

Historical

The Distant Hours

Kate Morton

When a long-lost letter arrives for her mother, Edie Burchill follows it to Milderhurst Castle in Kent, home to three elderly sisters, where her mother was sent as a girl during the war. A rich, gothic mystery of secrets and sisters.

Historical

Dear Mrs Bird

AJ Pearce

London, 1940. Emmy Lake dreams of being a war correspondent but lands a job typing letters for a formidable advice columnist who will not answer anything unpleasant. So Emmy starts secretly writing back. Funny, touching and full of wartime spirit.

HistoricalRomance

Set the Stars Alight

Amanda Dykes

Marine archaeologist Lucy Clairmont teams up with Dashel, a forensic astronomer, to solve a mystery reaching back to her family's past. Their search leads to 1770s England and two siblings with a story of their own. A lyrical, faith-filled dual-timeline novel.

LiteraryTranslated

The Housekeeper and the Professor

Yoko Ogawa

A brilliant mathematician has only eighty minutes of short-term memory. His new housekeeper and her ten-year-old son build a friendship with him that he must rediscover every day, through numbers and baseball. A small, luminous novel.

Contemporary

Leota's Garden

Francine Rivers

At eighty-three, Leota Reinhardt lives alone, estranged from her daughter, her once-beautiful garden gone to weeds. When her granddaughter Annie comes to know her, old wounds begin to heal. A moving story of faith and family from the author of Redeeming Love.

ClassicsHistorical

Maggie-Now

Betty Smith

In early twentieth-century Brooklyn, Maggie Moore looks after her stubborn father and her brother, then falls for a charming man who cannot stay in one place. A warm, big-hearted novel from the author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

ContemporaryTranslated

The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World

Laura Imai Messina

After losing her mother and daughter in the 2011 tsunami, Yui hears of a disconnected phone booth in a hillside garden where mourners come to speak to the people they have lost. There she meets Takeshi, and a slow healing begins. Inspired by a real wind phone in Japan.

Classics

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont

Elizabeth Taylor

Widowed and determined to stay independent, Mrs Palfrey moves into a faded London hotel full of elderly residents. When a kind young writer helps her after a fall, she passes him off as her grandson. A witty, poignant classic about old age and loneliness.

ContemporaryRomance

Austenland

Shannon Hale

Jane Hayes is thirty-something and hopelessly devoted to Mr Darcy. When a relative leaves her a stay at an English resort where guests live as if in an Austen novel, she hopes to get him out of her system for good. A light, funny romantic comedy.

Contemporary

The Actor and the Housewife

Shannon Hale

Becky Jack, a Mormon mother of four in Salt Lake City, meets a famous British film star, and against every expectation they become best friends. A funny, thoughtful novel about a friendship that makes no sense and matters a great deal.

Historical

True Sisters

Sandra Dallas

In 1856, four women join a Mormon handcart company walking from Iowa to Salt Lake City. As early snows close in, they depend on one another to survive. Based on a true story, a moving account of hardship and friendship.

Contemporary

Amber's Way

Gloria Galloway

Widowed before her daughter is born, Jessica promises Amber a happy life. After Amber comes through a cancer diagnosis, the two settle in the Sierra Nevada foothills, where Amber befriends an orphaned deer. A tender story of a mother and daughter.

HistoricalRomance

Rose Cottage

Mary Stewart

In the summer of 1947, war widow Kate Herrick returns to her childhood village to clear her grandmother's cottage before it is sold, and finds that someone has been searching the house. A gentle romantic mystery, the last of Mary Stewart's novels.

Contemporary

The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs

Alexander McCall Smith

Professor Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, a pompous expert in Romance philology, is mistaken for a vet and finds himself operating on a dachshund, one misadventure among many. Short, dry and very funny.

HistoricalRomance

The Firebird

Susanna Kearsley

Nicola Marter can sense the history of an object by touching it, a gift she keeps hidden. When a woman brings in a carving said to have belonged to Empress Catherine, Nicola needs proof, and turns to Rob McMorran, whose gift is stronger. The trail leads back to 1700s Scotland and Russia.

ContemporaryRomance

Famous for a Living

Melissa Ferguson

Influencer Cat Cranwell's career collapses overnight when her business partner is arrested, so she retreats to her uncle's tiny tourism office in a Montana national park. There she runs headlong into Hank, a ranger with no patience for cameras. A funny, warm romance about what is left of you when the followers go.

ContemporaryLiterary

The Lost Mozart

David K. Israel

A young music student comes across a fragment of a Mozart sketch that nobody has ever finished, and sets out to complete it and give its first performance. A novel about ambition, authorship, and what the living owe the dead.

Historical

Wish You Well

David Baldacci

A car accident leaves twelve-year-old Lou and her younger brother Oz without the parents they knew, and sends them from New York to their great-grandmother's farm high on a Virginia mountain. What they find there is hard work, sharp-eyed neighbours and a court fight for the land itself. Baldacci away from thrillers, writing the book closest to his own family.

HistoricalLiteraryRomance

The Other Bennet Sister

Janice Hadlow

Mary is the plain, overlooked middle Bennet, the one Jane Austen left in the background. Janice Hadlow gives her the rest of the story: the lonely stretch after her sisters marry, a move to London, and slowly, a mind and a life of her own.

Contemporary

Where Wilted Flowers Bloom

Johanna Rojas Vann

After a loss that upends her life, Sandra leaves New York for East Nashville, hoping distance will quiet her grief. Next door lives Mark, a widowed retired pastor who spends his days in his garden. Their unlikely friendship becomes a slow, gentle path back toward hope.

HistoricalRomance

The Swan House

Elizabeth Musser

Mary Swan Middleton has always taken for granted the advantages of her family's wealth. But a tragedy that touches all of Atlanta sends her reeling in grief. When the family maid challenges her to reach out to the less fortunate as a way to ease her own pain, Mary Swan meets Carl -- and everything changes.

ClassicsTranslated

White Nights

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A lonely young dreamer wanders St. Petersburg during the city's pale summer nights and meets Nastenka, a young woman waiting for a lover who promised to return. Over four nights they share their stories, and he falls quietly in love. A short, tender classic about loneliness and hope.

LiteraryHistorical

Peace Like a River

Leif Enger

Eleven-year-old Reuben Land tells of his father, a school janitor who works quiet miracles, and of the winter the family drives into the Dakota Badlands to find his fugitive older brother. Part western, part family story, written in plain and lovely prose.

Mild violence

HistoricalRomance

The Shoemaker's Wife

Adriana Trigiani

Enza and Ciro meet as teenagers in the Italian Alps, then are separated when each emigrates to America. Their paths cross again and again over the years that follow. A sweeping love story inspired by the author's grandparents.

Contemporary

Fake Plastic Love

Kimberley Tait

M. and her dazzling college friend Belle both land in New York finance, one wary of the shine and the other chasing it all the way onto Instagram. A wry, observant novel about ambition, friendship and how much of a life can be staged.

Contemporary

Birds on a Wire

Katie Powner

Eighteen-year-old Bri Marshall loses her newborn son, Providence, to foster care while she fights an addiction she cannot yet beat. Laura Gambler, thirty-nine and already a mother of three, takes the baby in. Told from both women's sides, it is a tender story about what it really means to be someone's mother.

ContemporaryRomance

The Brontë Plot

Katherine Reay

Lucy Alling sells rare books out of a Chicago design shop, until a client, James, catches her in a lie that could cost her career. His grandmother Helen invites Lucy to England anyway, and their tour of literary landmarks, all the way to the Brontë home at Haworth, makes Lucy face her own past before she can move forward.

Contemporary

The Second Chance Trailer Park

Katie Powner

Passed over at work and freshly single, fifty-two-year-old Meredith McGillicutty fibs about her age to move into Peaceful Pines, a retirement community where she plans to be left alone. Her new neighbors have other ideas. A funny, big-hearted story about starting again when you thought the best part was behind you.

Historical

From the Valley We Rise

Elizabeth Musser

Provence, summer 1944. In the town of Sisteron, Isabelle Seauve helps the Resistance hide Jewish children. Her fifteen-year-old cousin René reaches her after a German attack, bringing an orphaned Jewish girl with him, while an American army chaplain, Peter Christensen, still carries what he saw in North Africa. Their three stories meet as the Allies bomb the town.

Literary

Theo of Golden

Allen Levi

A mysterious traveler named Theo drifts into a small Georgia town and quietly changes the people who take him in. Allen Levi's debut is unhurried and gentle — a meditation on friendship, grief, and grace with no villain to speak of, just ordinary kindness given room to matter.

Mild languageMild violence

Why we picked it

This beautiful story may be one of our favorite books, ever. Prepare to cry.

LiteraryHistorical

Gilead

Marilynne Robinson

In 1956, John Ames — a preacher in a small Iowa town, old and ailing — begins a long letter to the young son he won't live to see grow up. What emerges is a life's accounting: his father and his abolitionist grandfather, a friendship that has cost him, and a hard-won gratitude for ordinary light. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

HistoricalContemporary

The Lost Bookshop

Evie Woods

In the 1920s, Opaline Carlisle runs from an arranged marriage to Paris and then Dublin, where she opens a bookshop of her own. A century later in Dublin, Martha, starting her life over, and Henry, a scholar chasing a lost manuscript, stumble on a shop that seems to appear and vanish. A dual-timeline story about books, second chances and a little magic.

LiteraryContemporaryRomance

Happy All the Time

Laurie Colwin

Two cousins in New York — Guido and Vincent — fall in love with two spirited, contrary women, and then have to work out what to do with the ordinary happiness that follows. Laurie Colwin's 1978 comedy is about the unglamorous business of staying in love: warm, wry, and full of very good food.

RomanceHistorical

Edenbrooke

Julianne Donaldson

Marianne Daventry escapes a dull season in Bath for her twin sister's invitation to Edenbrooke, a grand country estate — and arrives to find a highwayman on the road behind her and an infuriating, impossible-to-ignore gentleman waiting at the house. The novel that launched Shadow Mountain's Proper Romance line, an imprint built around romance written without explicit content.

Literary

Outline

Rachel Cusk

Fiction merges with oral history in this trilogy, which follows a British writer named Faye as she goes about her daily life and encounters a series of friends.

Why we picked it

We loved this quiet, thoughtful read on the meditations on life and the art of storytelling.

Classics

The Blue Castle

Lucy Maud Montgomery

Valancy Stirling has spent twenty-nine years being quietly miserable under her family's thumb — until a doctor's letter convinces her she has almost no time left, and she finally decides to actually live. L.M. Montgomery's only novel written for adults is funny, defiant, and deeply satisfying, with a romance as wholesome as her more famous Anne books.

Literary

The Edge of Sadness

Edwin O'Connor

In this moving novel, Father Hugh Kennedy, a recovering alcoholic, returns to Boston to repair his damaged priesthood. There he is drawn into the unruly world of the Carmodys, a sprawling, prosperous Irish family teeming with passion and riddled with secrets. The story of this entanglement is a beautifully rendered tale of grace and renewal, of friendship and longing, of loneliness and spiritual

ContemporaryRomance

The Rosie Project

Graeme Simsion

Don Tillman, a genetics professor who schedules his life to the minute, designs a sixteen-page questionnaire to find a wife — then meets Rosie, who fails nearly every criterion and upends the whole experiment. A funny, disarming love story told entirely in Don's precise, deadpan voice.

ContemporaryRomance

By Way of the Moonlight

Elizabeth Musser

A rearing horse, a crescent moon, and a story that moves between memory and longing. Elizabeth Musser's novel is lyrical and grounded — faith woven through ordinary lives without preaching, and a romance of the soul rather than the sensational.

Closed-door romance

Why we picked it

This sweet, dual timeline story captured our hearts, with the most, clever, satisfying ending.

HistoricalContemporary

All Manner of Things

Susie Finkbeiner

Summer 1967 in small-town Michigan — a soldier's return from Vietnam unsettles a family already holding its breath. Susie Finkbeiner writes with warmth and restraint; the story earns its hope without shortcuts. A quiet, faith-tinged historical novel with real emotional stakes and nothing you'd need to skip.

Mature themes handled with care

ContemporaryLiterary

Goodbye, Vitamin

Rachel Khong

Combining the pithy observation of Dept. of Speculation and the broken-hearted compassion of All My Puny Sorrows: an original, funny and tender novel, published by Scribner, about a family dealing with dementia.

Classics

Little Women

Louisa May Alcott

The March sisters — Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy — grow up together through poverty, ambition, and loss. Alcott's classic is warm, funny, and honest about what it costs to become yourself. Still the standard for wholesome family fiction that never talks down to you.

Classics

Mr. Blue

Myles Connolly

The novel follows the life of J. Blue, a man who inherits a vast fortune only to discard his wealth in favor of a life of intentional poverty and service. Inspired by the spirit of St. Francis of Assisi, the protagonist lives in a large packing box on a skyscraper rooftop in New York City, viewing the world through a lens of profound wonder and religious idealism.

Contemporary

Remarkably Bright Creatures

Shelby Van Pelt

A widowed cleaner at a small-town aquarium strikes up an unlikely friendship with Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus with opinions of his own — and a memory that may hold the key to a decades-old family mystery. Shelby Van Pelt balances heartache and humor with real warmth; funny, tender, and satisfying without a shred of grit.

Literary

The Great Divorce

C.S. Lewis

A busload of souls takes a day trip from a grey, quarrelsome town to the outskirts of Heaven, where each is offered a choice about what they're willing to let go of. C.S. Lewis's short allegory is imaginative and quietly piercing — more parable than plot, and one of his most quoted works outside Narnia.

Contemporary

The Edge of Belonging

Amanda Cox

A woman returning to her late grandmother's small Tennessee town uncovers a decades-old secret that reshapes everything she thought she knew about her family. Amanda Cox writes contemporary faith fiction with a light touch — a dual-timeline mystery about belonging and forgiveness, warm at its core.

Romance

Where Rainbows End

Cecelia Ahern

Told entirely through letters, emails, and notes passed across decades, this is the story of two lifelong best friends whose timing for real love never quite lines up. Cecelia Ahern's epistolary novel is funny, heartfelt, and refreshingly clean — a slow-build romance you'll be rooting for from page one.

LiteraryTranslated

The Summer Book

Tove Jansson

A six-year-old and her grandmother spend a quiet summer together on a tiny Finnish island, working through grief, mischief, and the small negotiations of growing up and growing old. Tove Jansson writes with dry humor and aching tenderness — nothing dark, nothing to skip, just two generations figuring each other out.

Historical

The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion

Beth Brower

Emma M. Lion inherits a crumbling London townhouse, an eccentric cast of neighbors, and absolutely no intention of behaving as a proper Victorian woman should. Beth Brower's journal-style series opener is whimsical and warmly funny — closer to a cozy afternoon than a plot-driven page-turner, and all the more charming for it.

ContemporaryTranslated

And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer

Fredrik Backman

Grandpa and Noah sit together on a bench in a square that keeps getting smaller every day, as Grandpa's memories fade and the two hold on to each other for as long as they can. Fredrik Backman's slim, devastating novella is about love, forgetting, and learning to say goodbye.

Classics

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen

Elizabeth Bennet is quick-witted and unimpressed by Mr. Darcy's pride; he's quietly undone by her refusal to be impressed. Jane Austen's most beloved novel is as sharp and funny two centuries on as it ever was — a courtship story with real wit behind the manners.

Contemporary

The Memory of Lavender and Sage

Aimie K. Runyan

Lavender fields, a cottage door, and a past that won't stay buried. Aimie K. Runyan writes historical fiction with a gentle hand — romance and mystery in equal measure, rooted in place and memory, with nothing gratuitous on the page.

Mild language

LiteraryContemporaryTranslated

Sweet Bean Paste

Durian Sukegawa

An ex-convict running a modest dorayaki stall reluctantly hires an elderly woman with an extraordinary gift for sweet bean paste — and learns something about dignity and second chances along the way. Durian Sukegawa's novel is quiet and moving, handling its themes with restraint rather than shock.

Contemporary

A Piece of the Moon

Chris Fabry

After his estranged father's death, a man returns to the family homestead in West Virginia and finds pieces of a story he never knew — about love, faith, and a moon landing that changed everything. Chris Fabry writes small-town reconciliation with warmth and restraint, never veering into melodrama.

LiteraryClassicsTranslated

The Little Prince

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

A stranded pilot meets a small visitor from another planet, and what follows is a gentle meditation on love, loss, and what adults forget to notice. Saint-Exupéry's slim fable has charmed readers for generations — a foxes-and-roses parable, gently illustrated, safe for every age at once.

ContemporaryTranslated

The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared

Jonas Jonasson

On his hundredth birthday, Allan Karlsson climbs out the nursing-home window and stumbles into an absurd international caper, while flashbacks reveal a life that brushed up against the 20th century's biggest events. Jonas Jonasson's bestseller is wildly funny and light on its feet — a farcical romp with nothing objectionable, just deadpan charm.

LiteraryContemporaryTranslated

Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Toshikazu Kawaguchi

In a small Tokyo café, customers can travel back in time — but only for as long as it takes their coffee to go cold, and only if they follow the café's strict rules. Toshikazu Kawaguchi's gentle time-slip novel is more about regret and reconciliation than science fiction; warm, wistful, and entirely wholesome.

Contemporary

Where'd You Go, Bernadette

Maria Semple

Told through emails, letters, and school memos, this comic novel follows a teenager piecing together why her brilliant, reclusive mother vanished right before a family trip to Antarctica. Maria Semple's satire is sharp and very funny — a little biting about Seattle culture, but nothing racy, just genuinely clever farce.

Historical

Hannah Coulter

Wendell Berry

Hannah Coulter looks back across a lifetime on a Kentucky farm — two marriages, a community built and lost, and the hope she finds again when her wayward grandson finally comes home to work the land. A quiet, deeply felt tribute to rural life and the ties that outlast us.

Mild languageMild violence

Contemporary

At Home in Mitford

Jan Karon

Father Tim, the bachelor rector of a small mountain parish, wants for nothing — until a dog the size of a sofa moves in uninvited, an intriguing neighbor starts wearing a path through the hedge, and a lonely boy and a decades-old secret upend his quiet life. The first novel in Jan Karon's beloved Mitford series: gentle, funny, small-town comfort reading.